Models of idiom comprehension differ in their predictions concerning compositionality and the necessity of parallel processing of literal and figurative meaning. The author of this paper assumes that the listener has to deal with two competing processes of meaning activation during idiom comprehension - a compositional bottom-up process and a holistic top-down process. During comprehension the matching of syntactic chunks with lexical items in the mental lexicon plays an important role. In offline experiments the author found positive correlations between the predictability, familiarity, meaningfulness and literality of German idioms; in online experiments familiarity, syntactic simplicity and an idiomatic cue in idiom-initial position facilitated faster idiom-recognition. Due to their low level of lexicalization, the processing of less-known idioms seems to greatly rely on compositionality, whereas better-known idioms greatly rely on holistic processing, i.e. on retrieval from the mental lexicon.
COBISS.SI-ID: 50441570
Scientific and technical findings in recent decades have witnessed an upturn in phraseology research as well as in phraseodidactics. It could therefore be expected that topical school textbooks would already reflect these findings. This contribution analyzes the number and the frequency of idioms as well as their value in the current school textbooks for teaching German as a foreign language at the B2 level. These have been developed by the big, German-speaking publishing companies, Langenscheidt, Hueber and Klett, and areused worldwide for teaching German as a foreign language. The findings are discussed and relevant didactic guidelines formulated for an optimal pedagogical approach to idioms in teaching German as a foreign language.
COBISS.SI-ID: 19012872
Autonomous learning of proverbs – eg. on the learning platform SprichWort-Plattform - requires practical and understandably written hints for the user´s effective learning process. These are usable for an autonomously structured and led or partially led learning of proverbs, as well as for the guided learning of proverbs in the classical learning process of learning German as a foreign language.
COBISS.SI-ID: 19339784